Saturday, September 3, 2016

RT News: ‘Alien cliques’ may be keeping Earth isolated - study

If the idea really is true that aliens are deliberately
preventing humans from contacting them, then extraterrestrial
civilizations most likely formed a number of cliques rather than a
pan-galactic government, a new study suggests.

The Fermi paradox – named
after physicist Enrico Fermi – says that if sentient life is not unique
to Earth, then our galaxy should have plenty of other civilizations,
including some more technologically advanced than ours. The paradoxical
part is that we have not detected any signs of them.

A supposition called ‘the zoo hypothesis’ is one possible
solution for this conundrum, and states that alien civilizations are for
some reason deliberately keeping humans from detecting any
extraterrestrial life.

One problem with this answer is that it
would require the galactic community to form a united government to
agree on and enforce such an information blockade. In a paper published
online this week, astrophysicist Duncan H. Forgan used a model which
showed that if there are indeed multiple civilizations in the Milky Way,
they are much more likely to form a number of cliques than a single
galactic club.

The model accounts for a number of factors,
including the time when each civilization advances enough to participate
in interstellar communication, the distances between their origin
worlds, and the lifetimes of the civilizations.

“We find that
for there to be only a single group (a ‘Galactic Club’), the mean
civilization lifetime must be extremely long, and the arrival time
between civilizations must in fact be relatively short. This is perhaps
an unlikely scenario, as it would require a large number of
civilizations to emerge across the galaxy in a very short time frame,” the paper said.

The
study also found that a single long-lasting civilization arriving early
in the galaxy’s history would still be unlikely to knit all
civilizations into a united club. But if all civilizations arrived
relatively uniformly and lasted much longer than a million years, then
such a club could exist.

A more likely scenario however is that
there are multiple conflicting cliques of civilizations that cannot
agree on a universal policy.

“One clique attempting to place
an interdict on contacting ‘primitive’ civilizations is likely to
encounter significant problems if another clique disagrees,” Forgan said.

“It
may well still be the case that the Earth resides in a region of space
occupied by a conservative clique bent on non-contact,” the paper added. “However,
as our ability to detect unintentional signals from both living and
dead civilizations increases, we should presumably be able to break the
deadlock imposed in this scenario.”